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Huawei’s new Emotion UI gets its own Chinese official website, should be up for download soon

Although it’s still not a name to be reckoned with in the Western technology world, Huawei is certainly making efforts to change that and get in the high-end mix. The Ascend P1, P1S and especially the Ascend D Quad are the devices that could put Huawei on the map in Europe and the US, but unfortunately they still can’t be found in many parts of the world outside Asia.

Huawei will also be trying to draw the attention of tech users with a couple of software innovations, the most important one being the introduction of the Emotion UI for Android 4.0 ICS. The user interface, unveiled back in May, now has its own official website (in Chinese) and should be up for grabs soon enough.

In fact, the new UI should have already been up for download, but for some reason the install links for the Ascend P1 E and Honor Glory don’t work, while the Ascend P1’s overlay is still listed as “coming soon”. There isn’t much to do before actually seeing the Emotion UI go live, so let’s take a look on what the official website says about the overlay (using Google Translate, of course).

“Probably the world’s most emotional system” is described by Huawei as powerful, easy to use, and easy to enjoy, and the first thing we can notice about it is that it kind of looks like a more minimalistic version of Samsung’s TouchWiz.

That’s a good thing, though, because most users don’t necessarily appreciate overly complex tweaks and customizations and, for the most part, the Emotion UI doesn’t seem to be spoiling the Google “pure experience” very much.

Among the original features it brings to the table, there’s a voice assistant app only functional in Chinese at this time, customizable homescreens and animations, access to Huawei’s cloud service, custom desktop apps, theme-switching, and an “intelligent contact finder”.

The skin should come to Huawei’s future flagship, the Ascend D Quad, soon, and it might be pre-installed on the device when it will finally hit the market. No words on when we should expect an English version of the Emotion UI with all that entails, but we’ll probably be hearing on that in the coming weeks.

What do you guys think? Is the Emotion UI the kind of original software tweak that can make Huawei’s new high-end phones more attractive, or is it another overlay that will make Android look cheaper and feel less functional?